


College Freshman, 19, Loses Virginity in Tragic Accident

by CPericardium



Series: The LBD-verse [3]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Drugs, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Self-Harm, Slice of Life, life bends down
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-08 12:38:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18894805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CPericardium/pseuds/CPericardium
Summary: "The second time was pills," David said, leaning back into his wheelchair, "but I didn't go through with more than two.”“Why?”“I realised I’d have to wait.”





	College Freshman, 19, Loses Virginity in Tragic Accident

**Author's Note:**

> Set in my no-powers college AU [Life Bends Down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13796073). Reading that first would be nice but not necessary. Elliot is Hero and David is Eidolon.

******October 2017**

Elliot sat on the bedroom floor, one spindly leg stretched out, the other folded tight against his chest. There was nowhere else to sit besides David’s bed, and the fact that the bachelor had a king-size mattress was enough of a red flag that Elliot was willing to put up with a little discomfort.

David’s daughter Samantha sat in front of Elliot. She wore a white ruffled camisole and dove-patterned pyjama pants. Her long silvery hair, still done up in the braids that Rebecca had given her earlier, dangled around her face as she delved into a wooden crate. Even with her head lowered, she kept her gaze trained on him.

It was an oddly intense expression to see on one so young, especially one with so seraphic a countenance. Anyone else might have felt hunted.

But Elliot had spent his teenage years around children going through difficult circumstances. It was impossible for him not to feel tender towards the very small, as long as they behaved.

Samantha behaved, mostly. Bouts of harmless mischief were inevitable. While shyer than her brothers, she was precocious: at almost five years old, she’d become adept at crayon graffiti, operating the stove, deactivating the carbon monoxide sensors around the unflued gas heater, and tuning the radio to static channels on dark and lonely nights.

She had also recently developed a penchant for disassembling household appliances and reassembling them into various gadgets of indiscernible function, something Elliot related to and hoped to nurture. David wasn't the nurturing type, so someone had to pick up the slack.

Today Samantha seemed content to entertain herself with store-bought toys—colourful alphabet blocks coated with varnish to keep the paint from chipping, not that she was ever so careless in her play. She picked each lettered block from the crate with the delicacy and precision of a harpist plucking strings, setting them before Elliot in turn.

When she was done, two rows of blocks spelt out ‘ _D-E-T-R-I-T-U-S’_ and _‘E-N-N-U-I’._

Samantha paused, seeking a reaction.

He flashed her a smile to show he was paying attention.

Though her face remained impassive, something in those ice-grey eyes gave him the impression of dissatisfaction. She dispersed both rows with a swipe of splayed fingers, and reached for blocks to make her next word.

Block by block, the word _‘T-U-I-T-I-O-N’_ took shape. An ‘F’, two ‘E’s and an 'S' soon followed.

She looked up at him again.

He widened his smile and nodded encouragingly.

Again, that restrained sense of vexation, roiling just beneath the skin. She reached for more blocks.

_“Hey.”_

Elliot jumped. He turned his head and scowled at the man in the wheelchair rolling into the room.

Rebecca talked like a freight train laying down track as she went. Hana generally volunteered cautious, thoughtful opinions unless angered, whereupon she would volunteer cautious, thoughtful opinions in a slightly sharper tone.

David, however. David always spoke as though he was still mulling over what he was saying, relying on his sonorous baritone to impregnate his words with undeserved but nonetheless devastating erotic oratory power. It didn’t matter that he _looked_ like the result of a hospice nurse’s refusal to pull the plug—when he spoke, people listened.

 _“_ Why are you here?” David asked.

“Rebecca wanted me to watch Sammy, ass—” Elliot caught himself. “—sparagus-wipe. This is where she is.”

Samantha peered up at her father with searching eyes.

David furrowed his brow as if just noticing her. He stared at the word she’d made by his feet.

_‘S-I-S-Y-F-E-A-N’._

“Learn to spell or imagine him happy, kid,” he told the girl, and her expression soured. He pointed at the open door. “Out. This is Daddy’s room.”

Samantha obeyed sullenly, standing and dragging her feet.

“Take your toys with you. I can’t be held responsible for what happens to them,” David called after her.

She didn’t respond. Through the doorway, Elliot watched her step into the elevator across the hall. David’s house had two of them. They looked like especially tall glass dumbwaiters, each with a big blue button inside the cabin that had to be held down manually for the duration of the journey.

She raised a hand to press the button and the elevator groaned into motion. As it crept upwards, her eyes never left Elliot’s.

David manoeuvred his way to his desk, shuffling stray blocks up against the mopboard with the wheels of his chair.

One of the blocks pinged off the wall and skittered into the space underneath David’s dresser. Elliot heaved a sigh. He crawled over to collect it before it got stuck under that crevice.

Luckily, it bumped into something else before it could get too far. A book. He dragged the bulky thing out along with the block. There was surprisingly little dust on its untitled pink cardboard cover, meaning it had been hidden there recently. Bound by ribbons threaded through holes, it was too wide and unwieldy to be a diary.

He reasoned that any unsecured, obviously non-diary items were fair game. It was probably Samantha’s—he’d just check. Crêpe paper accents crinkled as he hefted it onto his lap and flipped to the middle. He started turning pages from there.

Photos. With captions.

Here was Samantha in the garden, modifying the design of the bird feeder to incorporate piano wire. There was Benjamin in the garage, bludgeoning a live generator with a monkey wrench. Levi in the kitchen, features blurred as he’d been moving at the time, splashing through ankle-deep water. Samantha again, with her eye so close to the camera that the white couldn’t be seen.

A few of the pictures were candid shots taken by a phone camera, but most were taken by some other device—a hidden one, because parts were often obscured by cloth or other objects. They all had the same low resolution. They all had dates and timestamps printed at the corners, accurate to the second.

 _Baby monitor footage_ , he realised.

“Hey,” David said, from his desk. “Don’t touch my shit.”

Elliot held it out to him. “Whatever. Take your scrapbook back.”

“It’s not a scrapbook,” David growled, rolling over and snatching it out of the air before wheeling back. “I’m studying their behavioural patterns.”

"They might be easier to study in video format."

“I need to study the individual _frames.”_

“Do you also need to paste them on construction paper and write ‘Levi’s First Homemade Swimming Pool’ in glitter glue that you obviously stole from Rebecca? Gayest shit I've seen in my life."

“Not surprised. If I were you, I wouldn’t look in the mirror either.” He rummaged through the clutter on his desk, fishing out a bottle. He passed it to Elliot. “Scotch, whiskey, or bourbon?”

Elliot turned the bottle over and squinted at the label. “This is moonshine.”

“That’s what it says, yeah.”

“I can’t have alcohol.” He handed it back.

“Enjoy splashing on cockroaches back at the stinky shack, goblin boy.” David uncapped the bottle with the aid of his car key. He took a swig, then asked, “What’s your damage?”

Elliot’s head snapped up. “What?”

“Can’t do this, can’t do that. Can you do anything?”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s one. Anything else?”

“Fuck _off_ , David," Elliot said, with more venom.

“Only asking,” David said. “Hana wouldn’t tell me.”

“Good.”

“Rebecca did.”

 _Why!?_ Elliot immediately made to grab the bottle back.

David held it out of reach, looking uncomfortable, like he thought Elliot might brain him with it instead of using it to drink himself into a blissful oblivion where best friends didn’t sell each other down the river. “Nothing specific. She wanted me to talk with you about it, whatever ‘it’ was. She thought it would help.”

“Rebecca assumes I want to talk about it,” Elliot said. “She further assumes I want to talk about it with _you.”_

“Is she right?”

“...yes,” Elliot admitted grudgingly. “ _Not_ about the second thing.”

“You could talk about it to yourself,” David suggested. “I’ll just be here, in the same room. Talking to myself as well. Sometimes with coincidentally relevant responses.”

Elliot rolled his eyes. “Always a fan of parallel activity.”

"I might ask myself why Rebecca thought talking about something _today_ would be relevant."

“Stop.” Elliot wasn't in the mood. “I had to leave in the middle of class today because I _passed out_. Okay, David? Are you happy now?”

“I pass out every few seconds and no one notices.”

“I’m in one of the most competitive engineering programmes in the country. I can’t just go around having spontaneous heart attacks and strokes. Which seems increasingly likely at the rate this fucking shit machine is going.” He pointed at his chest with both hands.

David didn’t say anything in response, choosing to droop and focus on his lap instead.

“I’d rather the professor thought I fell asleep,” Elliot went on. “At least narcoleptics graduate. Syncope, more like cope with sin. Everyone else is working their asses off. Everyone else is adding fancy shit to their models because they can. But I can’t do it. I can’t do the normal student thing and pull all-nighters and drink coffee. And the prof’s all, it’s about the concept—the utility, not the glitter, but some days I can’t even get that right.”

“They don’t call the first year the honeymoon year for nothing,” David said, apparently unaware of how top companies selected their interns. “No reason to be pushing yourself, much less punishing yourself.”

“ _God._ Can I do this? Can I do four years of this? Will I be _here_ in four years? Five? Or will everything have given out by then?”   

“Be an analyst. Research and shit.”

“I have _ideas_ , David.” Elliot willed his voice not to crack, so of course it did. He threw his hands up. “Or I _had_ them. I used to have notebooks overflowing with them. Now I’m too weak to hold a stylus for even, fuck, an hour? Some days I can’t even think. I can’t—I can’t fucking do it. I’m useless.”

To his credit, David didn’t leap on that. “Are you worried you’ll lose your scholarship?”

“You know I’m not on scholarship, right? I’m on _financial aid_. For _disabilities._ I can’t even claim I didn’t need it, because I didn’t get the scholarship either. Because I couldn’t focus.”

His heart strained against his ribs. Dull throbs. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, he smiled up at David. “You know what’s hilarious? The therapists taught me all kinds of ways to manage pain. How to breathe. How to stand or sit or lie down. Where to go. What to listen to. What to think about. But at the same time I’m not supposed to _ignore_ pain. I have to take inventory of which of my organs is biting the dust at any given time—I have to catalogue the multitude of unique and fascinating ways I feel like shit. People say it’s hard to switch off without being asleep, but it’s actually stupid fucking easy for me. To be comatose for hours, let everything fade into the background. It’s so easy, it’s so tempting to just sink into that limbo. But I can’t because if I do, I might never leave.”

“So there is nothing you can do.”

Elliot prepared a tired glare, but he saw David’s face.

Not taunting. Matter-of-fact.

“Oh, no, there’s a ton of things I could do,” Elliot said. “I could suck it up, stay within my limits, study hard enough to scrape by. I could go to parties. Well, small quiet get-togethers. Meet new people. Get a job so I can pay my folks back for all the bills they’ve been footing since I was born. Hobbies. I could get _vices_ if they’re safe enough. E-cigs or whatever. Do _almost_ all the things people do. Maybe I’d even enjoy them.”

“But?”

“But I can feel myself shutting down every second of every day, year after year, and it’s just going to be…” Chest still aching, he drew in a breath and released it slowly. “It’s never going to get better. I’m always going to feel parts of me crumbling away. There’s just something everyone else has that I have less of as time goes on.”

“Control,” David said.

He said it with such surety that he must have had that word waiting there, must have sheltered it so deep in the marrow of his bones that the only thing he could do was share it.

For that, Elliot met his eyes, to let him know he’d given it the consideration it was due. But he shook his head. “Hope.”

“Ah.” David held his gaze. “Yeah, I get that.”

That, Elliot could believe, looking at him.

Rebecca claimed the same thing. Elliot loved her like a sister, but she didn’t get it. Rebecca couldn’t get it, because she’d gotten better. She’d gotten out.

His mouth felt dry. Maybe he should have accepted that drink after all. “I’m never going to be bigger than I am."

David lifted his eyebrows. “What do you mean, bigger?”

“For starters, I’m never gonna be a newspaper headline,” he said. “Except maybe as a statistic for clinical trials.”

“That’d be below the fold at best,” David said. “So you want to be famous? Noted?”

“Maybe I want to be special.” He smiled a little. “My teachers always said I had potential.”

He didn’t add that his parents never did. They weren’t that callous.

“David? Are you in here?” Hana poked her head in the doorway, sounding stressed. “David!”

David’s wheelchair turned a quarter-inch towards the door. “Yeah.”

“Where do you keep your shotgun slugs? I found birdshot, but I don’t want to hit Rebecca.”

“I don’t have a shotgun.”

Hana stepped into full view and racked the pump-action shotgun in her arms.

He shrugged. “Sammy.”

“Outstanding,” Hana said mildly. She ran her fingers over the gun, turning it over, checking for defects. “Well, Rebecca is going to be a toaster pastry in a few minutes if I don’t get some ammo, so if you guys could just help me out here...”

“There’s rock salt in Benny and Levi’s room,” David said.

"That might work. Where?"

“Benny's nightstand. It's for the monsters under his bed."

“Right, thanks.” She turned to go, then turned back and looked Elliot in the eye. "You know, if you could also summon up a shred of concern for our friend who is about to be boiled alive, that’d be nifty.”

“Rebecca can handle them,” Elliot said.

“No,” Hana said, “no, she very much can’t. She is decidedly failing to handle one of them at this very moment.”

“You’re freaking out over nothing.”

Her eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

“Benny likes science,” he said. “That interest should be cultivated instead of stifled.”

“This isn’t some... baking soda papier-mâché volcano, Elliot.” Hana’s voice started to rise in pitch, but she effortfully flattened it. “This is a fucking self-regulating lake of fucking lava in the fucking backyard, and Rebecca is literally fucking descending into it.”

“That kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life, Hana.”

“It is happening right the fuck now _,_ which you would notice if you’d come outside like I told you to, or in about three minutes when the smell of Rebecca pieróg wafts in. The dryer isn’t going to hold Levi for much longer because someone took half of it apart, and I don’t know where the fuck Sammy is or what she’s plotting because the person who was _supposed_ to be watching her is busy canoodling with her father. Do you even—”

“This hot tub is amazing!” Rebecca’s gleeful voice, from somewhere outside.

Hana spun around and sprinted down the hall to the children’s room. Shortly afterwards, they heard the sound of a round being chambered, followed by the receding clumps of her boots on linoleum.

“She doesn’t get kids,” David said.

Elliot agreed, but he wasn't about to agree out loud. He’d check in on her and Rebecca later. “She doesn’t really think we’re canoodling, right?”

David frowned. “I canoodled once. That was how I found out foreskin doesn’t grow back."

“Hey, Dave?”

“What?”

“Remember how when we met,” Elliot said, “you didn’t talk much, and I thought you were the strong silent type? I miss those days.”

“Yeah.” David rubbed at the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Yeah, me too.”

They lapsed into silence for the next few minutes. Elliot vegetated, staring at the reliable stretch of wall over the bed. David drank more before setting the bottle back on his desk. It toppled, but it was empty anyway.

"I tried suicide twice," David said.

Elliot looked up.

"Once when I was fifteen, once just before I got custody of Benny.”

“Oh.” A pang of sympathy drew Elliot hesitantly forward. “Uh. David, I’m sorry.”

“Jesus. No, shut up,” David said. “I didn’t tell you so you could use it to justify being a pussy. You start blubbering at me, I’m actually going to fucking kill myself.”

Elliot closed his mouth, rocking back.

“The reason I said I tried it instead of committed it is that if I had been going to commit it, I’d have picked a method that was one hundred percent guaranteed to succeed. It turns out that climbing out a second-floor window in full view of the gardener who was supposed to be on his day off, getting dragged back into the house by him and the housekeeper, and swearing them to secrecy on the condition you don't do that again is _not_ a method guaranteed to succeed, so here I still am." He spread his arms without much emotion.

“And, the…” Elliot trailed off, reconsidering. “Never mind. Sorry.”

"The second time was pills," David said, leaning back into his wheelchair, "but I didn't go through with more than two.”

“Why?”

“I realised I’d have to wait.” David knocked on his desk. "There was a clock in the bathroom. Cheap, ugly orange plastic thing with cat ears and whiskers for hands. It was so ugly. I hated it. Probably why it was there and not where it could really be useful. It’s in the living room now. You see it?”

Elliot couldn’t remember if he had, but he nodded.

“I kept staring at that clock,” David said. “The whole—driving to the pharmacy, buying the bottle, filling up the glass of water—it'd all only taken thirty minutes, tops. I didn't know how long everything else would take, what I was meant to do for the rest of the morning. I was about to spend the last moments of my life _dying._ I thought it would be active. I’d make the decision, execute it, execute myself. But it wasn't. It was just waiting.

“There are other ways—more lethal, no wait time. I’d only taken two at that point. Bear in mind, I was just trying suicide out. Seeing how it fit, if I could be comfortable with the idea.” David’s eyes wandered over the junk on his desk. “Turns out I wasn't. If I’m bleeding from the mouth I want it to be because I eat glass for a living, not because my tongue got in the way when my skull went nutcracker. If I wake up on the pavement, I want it to be because that’s where I decided to crash for the night, not because some rogue neuron thought it would be funny if I facefucked the floor.”

“You don’t care what happens to you,” Elliot said. “As long as you’re the one to choose.”

“Pretty much. Sitting around waiting for _I’m a corpse_ o’clock didn’t feel like a choice,” David said. “So I made myself throw up what I’d taken, flushed the rest, put on my robe, and spit-roasted the couple next door.”

The image asserted itself in Elliot’s mind unbidden. He grimaced.

“That’s how Levi was conceived.” David opened a drawer to take out a frameless mirror. He glanced over his shoulder at Elliot and somehow misapprehended his expression as a desire for more information. "They moved."

"Before or after he was born?"

"They left him on my doorstep with the birth certificate. Name was left blank, but I was wearing jeans at the time.”

“This is the worst story ever,” Elliot said.

“Tough shit. It’s what happened.” David paused, idly tapping a credit card he’d removed from his pocket against his right wheel. “I never told anyone before.”

“So, uh…”  Elliot chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Why’d you tell me?”

“Some of it was quid pro quo. As he rotated back towards his desk, David glanced down at his feet. “Some of it—pissing contest, but only because I knew we would cross streams.”

“Charming,” Elliot said. In a quieter voice: “Thanks.”

David proceeded to deposit a pile of white powder on the mirror and break it up with the credit card before inhaling it through a little roll of paper. When the powder was all gone, he launched into a brief coughing fit. The roll of paper dropped onto his desk.

He sat for a while without speaking, his shoulders hunching, then relaxing, then hunching again.

He turned back to Elliot. His pupils were dilated and his breathing was faster. Other than that he looked and acted utterly, alarmingly the same.

Elliot wasn't especially familiar with the effects of cocaine on people with epilepsy, but anyone could guess that the interaction wouldn’t be pretty. He wondered if the powder was cut with a downer, like cannabis, or if David was just so desensitised that chemicals ceased to have any impact on him at all.

David wheeled towards him with the mostly empty baggie in his lap.

“I can’t do that,” Elliot said, holding up a hand. “I’d die, actually.”

“Bitch, you think I’d let you?” David made an incredulous noise that could have been described as a snort, were it not distinct from the noise he made when he was actually inhaling coke. “This is all for me.”

Elliot angled himself away. “ _Be that as it may._ I don’t want that stuff near me. I don’t want to breathe it in, or ingest it...”

“Only way that could happen,” David said, “is if we make out after. And that won’t happen, because I’m not gay. Now unzip.”

“What?” Elliot stared back in confused fear until David's eyes flicked towards his crotch. He recoiled. “No. What the hell?”

“Or don’t.” David shrugged. “I don’t really care. Just thought you were working up the courage to ask, that’s all.”

“Why would I—why would you even offer that?”

“I thought we bonded. Wasn’t that a prelude?”

“No! Not everything is a prelude, David, you goddamn manwhore,” Elliot said, clutching his knees to his chest in a protective self-embrace. “You’re like, eight years older than me. You're a predator.”

“Oh no.” David drummed on the armrests of his wheelchair. “How will you outrun me?”

“David. I don’t want that.”     

“Okay.”

“I want a lot of things. But not that.”

“Okay,” David said, close to gently. “It’s okay. It’s all good.”

Elliot’s eyes watered. He swallowed hard and turned his head away. “No. It’s not. It’s not all good.”

“Listen.”

Still facing the open door, Elliot listened.

“I don’t think either of us can have what we want. Ever. I don’t think it gets better.”

“Uplifting,” Elliot snapped. “You should make PSAs so I can sue you for plagiarism.”

“Maybe we get better at dealing with it. but the reality doesn’t go away. You know what you are. You’re the boy with the _condition_. The boy who can’t function some days. Maybe lashes out because of it. Other people look at you, and they can see it too.”

“I don’t care what other people think,” he said, at once, automatically.

“Neither do I,” David said.

They both let the lie hang between them, dangling on its noose.

David continued, “Modern medicine can’t save us from ourselves. Who knows who we’d be if things had shaken out differently? Who knows what there might have been room for? Something I realised, a couple of years back—I’m never going to have this one big thing.”

“What big thing?”

Instead of answering, David slid the scrapbook off the desk and onto his lap. He flipped it open, landing on a high-angle black-and-white photograph of Samantha loosening the screws on the rods that held up a familiar striped shower curtain. She was staring up at the ceiling, directly at the viewer.

“Why is there a security camera in the guest bathroom,” Elliot said.

“I may not have much. I may not be able to,” David declared, fist to the page. “But I have Sammy and Benny.”

“And Levi.” Elliot frowned. “And a security camera in the guest bathroom. Seriously, the fuck?”

“I have friends. I have little shots of pleasure, flashes of sun on a cold, dark sea.”

“Do you though? Do you have friends? Do you take pleasure in badly quoting Rebecca quoting Sartre? What about the security camera in the guest bathroom?”

“Philosophy is a shiny toy. But I try not to overindulge.” David’s right wheel nudged one of the alphabet blocks next to Elliot’s knee. “I almost lost everything,” he said. “Because I couldn’t see what was in front of me. Don’t make the same mistake.”

David raked his messy hair back, the movement of his arm only a little jittery. There was more conviction behind his words, beyond the easy gruff depth his voice granted them. His dark brown eyes were wider, wilder, more alive.

Elliot’s face heated. “Right. Typical. What’s in front of me is my—” He gestured south of the border. “Yeah. What were you even planning to do? It’s not like you can kneel.”

“Ignorant child,” David said, flicking imperiously at the air. “Get on the bed and I’ll show you.”

Annoyingly casual for what he was suggesting, and preternaturally composed for how much joy juice had to be coursing through his system.

But Elliot couldn’t help being curious.

The rumours might be true. Rebecca might be right. David might be a good person. And if all these were possible, Elliot might have a shot at being happy.

He took his time getting to his feet, breathing steadily. He tilted his head and tried to find a trick of light and perspective that would allow him to find David attractive, some fortuitous shadow to smooth over the creases that aged him and carve hollows out of his heavy cheeks.

There was, he thought, grasping for sonder, a rugged appeal to bags under the eyes and prominent pores. He mentally superimposed an image of a backwoods survivalist over the other man. Grit under the fingernails. Utility pouch. Bag of bear urine. Flannel.

David waited patiently.

Elliot wondered if David was doing the same thing, if he was imagining a broader, gym-sculpted figure towering over him, instead of this scrawny, homely kid shrinking away from proximity.

Maybe the drugs did it for him. Maybe he didn’t care.

Elliot wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers. His hand circled his fly, but he jerked it back to his side and closed it into a fist. “This isn’t gonna be like, a regular thing. I’m not gonna be another notch on your belt.”

"None of my notches are regular things," David said, rolling inexorably closer. “My high isn’t going to last long enough to both take care of you and listen to you whine. Yes or no, limited time offer."

“Okay,” Elliot muttered tensely. “Whatever.”

David motioned towards the bed.

Elliot climbed onto it with a haste he regretted, screwed his eyes shut, and twisted his head up to face the ceiling for good measure. After a few seconds, his legs edged apart. “Yeah, okay. Do it.”

David didn’t move. “Why are you shaking? I’m not shaking and I’m on enough stimulants to power the city grid.”

“I’m n-not. Can you shut up and just get it over with?”

“You think I’m gonna bite or something? Because I can do that if you want.”

“If you—” Elliot spoke through a clenched jaw, his entire body shivering with his heartbeat. “If you use teeth, I will strangle you with your fraying belt.”

“That a promise?”

“Sh-shut _up_.”

A gunshot rang out, but neither of them paid it any heed.


End file.
